Backups. What a better time to test ’em than when you need ’em. Don’t lie. I know you’ve been there too. In an unfortunate turn of events, I had to restore a number of bare git repos from recent off-site copies (made with the handy rdiff-backup), but they needed a bit more work to be functional.

Once restored, I couldn’t pull or push from my existing working copies. I was greeted with cryptic error messages instead: fatal: git upload-pack: not our ref 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 and ! [remote rejected] master -> master (missing necessary objects), respectively.

No amount of searching led to an adequate solution. So I simply leveraged git’s distributedness, and used one of the clone to recreate my bare repo. I was nonetheless a bit worried about having lost a few commits on the tip.

Playing in the bare repo later on led me to a more satisfying solution. Apparently, the refs/heads/master file was corrupted (empty), and editing it to contain the full sha-1 of the tip was enough to fix the issue. I found the sha-1 of the desired commit in the packed-refs file at the root of the bare repo. Once done, everything worked as before, and pre-existing working copies were able to pull and push without issue.

I learned two things:

  • A bit more about git
  • That I didn’t actually have any more commits there

Backups! Yay!

Continue reading

I recently had to restore databases from a rough mysqldump backup in a piecemeal fashion. One necessity is to SET the environment correctly, lest some weird encoding issues happen when restoring the data, leading to failures.

A sed one-liner can help for this.

DBNAME=mydb
sed -n "/^-- Server version/,/^-- Current Database/p;/^-- Current Database.*${DBNAME}\`/,/^-- Current Database/{p}" mysqldump.sql > ${DBNAME}.sql

This extracts SQL from the initial header, to the first database, which contains all the sessions SETs. It then captures statements any time the target database is the current one. Note that this doesn’t restore the GRANTs.

Befor blindly piping the output SQL into mysql, one would be well advised to review the contents of the file, to ensure only the desired modifications are included.